The Internet Micro-Short Drama is Hard to Say

On Saturday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, a stark choice-sell its U.S. business or be banned. The bill was introduced in the Senate on Tuesday, where it passed by a wide margin of 79 votes to 18, and was then signed into law by President Joe Biden. The move has sparked concern among the social media app’s 170 million users in the U.S., knowing that about 170 million Americans spend at least an hour a day swiping on TikTok, and more than 40 percent of U.S. users even say it’s their regular news source. In recent years, TikTok has been the subject of numerous conversations, even in the context of national security. Undeniably, TikTok is an extremely important source of information and entertainment for today’s young generation, and whether the values conveyed by its content will affect people’s daily lives or even their judgment on important issues should not be overlooked. In this regard, the popularity of micro-dramas on the Internet is playing an important role.

TikTok is a video platform that provides one- or two-minute short videos to users, mostly young people. The content of these videos is wide-ranging, including jokes, commercials, personal sharing, anything from news to irresistible sketches. What is most concerning about this software is that it collects video and other data from users, analyzes it and sends it back to its headquarters in China, where it suggests new videos to users, making it a tool that collects countless amounts of user privacy to study, analyze, and potentially manipulate their behavior. This is precisely why the US government is now determined to take control of TikTok away from its unregulated parent company, ByteDance, in China.

In the past, criticism of TikTok has centered on the privacy and national security implications of the data it collects, but the popularity of TikTok in the West has also led to a massive export of webisodes from China to the West. Unlike traditional video products, which are regulated by the government on the basis of content, any kind of content can be included in a web series. The popularity of TikTok has also affected many people in Western societies. Today, we will look at TikTok’s manipulation of people’s behavior from a different perspective.

The “Myth of Wealth” Micro-series

Movie dramas are not new, they have been affecting everyone since the beginning of television, but they have always been regulated by society as an entertainment experience. Most of the TV dramas are 25 to 50 minutes in length, and are therefore mostly watched on TV or computer platforms during leisure time. However, webisodes, which are now popular on the internet, have entered every minute or every second of people’s lives through smartphones, and have a greater impact on people at any time.

Webisodes are a type of web series that started in China and is now popular in countries all over the world due to TikTok. Each episode of webisodes is about 2 minutes long, with a tight and continuous plot. As a video format between movies and novels, short dramas have unique characteristics in content creation. In recent years, short dramas have accounted for half of all short video content creation, and China has become the global kingdom of short drama production, dominating global production. According to industry statistics, over the past three years, the annual production of short dramas has surged from a few hundred to tens of thousands. The pursuit of low-cost and fast-paced short dramas corresponds to the long production cycle of long dramas. With the rising popularity of short dramas, the industry has seen the emergence of the phrase “7 days to finish shooting, 8 days to earn more than RMB 100 million, 10 days to get rich”, which was once even considered a “myth of wealth creation”. Data shows that in 2023, the number of users actively searching for micro-dramas on Shake Tone (the mainland China version of TikTok) increased twofold, and the number of micro-dramas with a broadcast volume of over 100 million reached 500, of which 12 had a broadcast volume of over 1 billion, with the number of micro-dramas broadcasted on a daily basis doubling.

The audience of micro-drama is often those who cannot be served by traditional movie and TV products. In other words, most of the audience of micro-dramas do not watch movies at all. Combined with China’s current Internet population of nearly 1.1 billion, it can be deduced that 600-700 million people in China have only a junior high school education, and this group of people is the basic market for micro-dramas. As a new growth point in the Internet economy, micro-drama has attracted a large amount of capital and production teams to enter the market. Although the ceiling of the short drama industry is only a few tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, it does not affect the enthusiasm of everyone to come in and make a fortune. However, it is obvious that this kind of crazy scene can not be sustained, or in other words, it can not be allowed to grow wildly.

Last year, the market size of micro-episodes in China reached 37.39 billion yuan (RMB), and it is estimated that by 2027, the market size will exceed 100 billion yuan (RMB). From the audience’s point of view, in addition to young people in small towns in third- and fourth-tier cities, more and more people in first- and second-tier cities who are living at home or returning to their hometowns are also holding their cell phones and brushing up on micro-dramas, and even paying for them. The pace is fast enough and the plot is cool enough to make the micro short drama explode and attract money last year. New opportunities have attracted long and short video platforms to increase their stakes, and big star IPs have entered the market, so the future of the micro drama industry is full of opportunities and hidden challenges. Especially in the generative artificial intelligence model and other new quality of productivity, the network micro short drama creation and production will meet the new repeated computing upgrade, and thus really towards the diversification, boutique development road.

Control the Market or Control the Speech

The aesthetics and style of many short micro-dramas still cannot escape the vulgar label – the underlying logic of the micro-drama “focusing on conflict, light on drama” determines that it is a channel for emotional release, and that it is a content product with a strong emotional color. The quality is not guaranteed. Young people who spend their days on Jitterbug have even developed an “addiction” to it. After all, teenagers are a group of people with varying degrees of self-control, who are easily influenced by their surroundings, and who pursue and follow trends. The latest trends on short videos are shared by a large number of young people. Coupled with peer pressure, it’s no surprise that the younger generation is addicted to them. According to the Pew Research Center, 60% of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok in the U.S. are also teenagers. It’s a global phenomenon. So what messages and values are conveyed in the content of micro-series is crucial for teens whose brains are not yet fully developed.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) of China has issued a new regulation on the filing of micro-dramas, and has been strictly reviewing and managing online micro-dramas since June 1: all micro-dramas broadcast, streamed, and pushed on the Internet must have a “Web Drama Distribution Permit” or complete the corresponding online reporting and registration process, and micro-dramas that have not been audited and filed are not permitted to be disseminated on the Internet. Before the implementation of the new regulations, Jitterbug, Shutterbug and other audiovisual platforms have begun self-censorship, and some of the micro-dramas have been accused of containing content that “promotes unhealthy and non-mainstream views on family, marriage and love, and deliberately amplifies and renders conflicts between couples and mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, etc.,” which was taken down by Jitterbug platforms. ShakeYin has also issued a special governance announcement to encourage and promote quality micro-dramas, and to continue its governance of micro-dramas that contain illegal content such as those with undesirable values, those that violate public order and morality, and those that are vulgar and “rubbing the wrong side of the tracks”.

Since China has not yet established a classification system for movie and TV works, all that has been done is administrative intervention by government departments and self-examination and self-correction by online platforms. Nowadays, more and more short-form video publishers, in order to increase the number of hits, often expose social injustice, embarrassing the government, which can only find excuses to block them. In addition, the media is a propaganda tool in China, and has a role in guiding public opinion. If more and more micro-short videos hit the pain points of the society and play a little bit of policy, then a competitive trend will be formed in the circle. This is probably something that the press authority or the public opinion control department does not want to see. Therefore, the Chinese government is regulating and controlling them, restricting their development in various ways; but naturally, this kind of governance is not free from the suspicion of controlling freedom of speech and clamping down on public opinion.

Impact on the Western World

As this new form of content consumption born in China has matured, micro-dramas are inevitably moving out of the country and into overseas markets. In the U.S., the biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, owned by northern California-based Crazy Maple Studio and backed by Chinese digital publisher Chinese Online Group. The mobile app, which offers users episodes of up to a few minutes in length on a flip-screen screen, hopes to bring the successful model it has built in China to the U.S. by attracting millions of Americans to its short-form content. ReelShort offers more than a dozen one-minute episodes for free on a variety of platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. But after the first few episodes, they have to pay a fee or watch a commercial to see what happens afterward.

Now the ReelShort platform is a huge hit with Chinese American women – 70% of its users are women, and nearly half are over the age of 45. It seems that human nature is common to all countries, and they can’t get enough of all kinds of short videos on the subject of hegemony. What’s more, human nature has been highly stable throughout the evolution of mankind: greedy for beauty, wealth and food, suspicious and irritable, with a lingering sense of vanity and arrogant superiority. …… These weaknesses of human nature have eventually become the promised land of milk and honey flowing outward in today’s highly developed commercial society! –Numerous trillion-dollar businesses are based on this. Micro-drama is just a new business based on this.

Although the regulation of micro short dramas in China continues to increase, and began to increase the audit of short dramas, but these short videos are still in the overseas wind: from the overbearing president, to the werewolf and vampire love, and then revenge sadistic love …… These short dramas, which had been in the domestic screen repeatedly, are now also in the overseas set off a new trend. A large number of earthy short dramas have flooded into Europe and the United States, the Middle East and Southeast Asian markets, not only overseas Chinese head, but also local natives are willing to pay, and even some domestic viewers to learn English. Obviously, compared to the increasingly competitive domestic market, the overseas market is still a blue ocean that needs to be explored and has a lot of potential.

Western countries rarely take the initiative to regulate media content because of their respect for individual freedom, and when there is a conflict between ideology and mainstream social values, they usually categorize the content and restrict the audience to protect young people who are not mature enough to understand. This is also a problem that cannot be ignored. Especially considering that the cost of legislation in Europe and the United States is relatively high, the regulation of this area is relatively lax, which has left time for many players to set up their business. Of course, if Chinese manufacturers want to establish a firm foothold in the European and American markets through micro-drama, they still face big challenges, the first and foremost of which is the communication of ideas. Although the promotion of short dramas has been completed in some areas, it will take time for other regions with different cultures and preferences to accept the form of short dramas. The passage of the TikTok bill in the U.S. may add a touch of uncertainty to the development of micro-episodes in overseas markets.

Article/Editorial Department (Sameway Magazine)

Photo/Internet